Anything about the development of NYC always interests me. Regards, Len

An Opera About Robert Moses Is Among the River to River Festival Highlights

By JOSHUA BARONE APRIL 12, 2017

A multimedia opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs; an expansive artwork about the African diaspora; and a site-specific music and dance spectacle about the United States’ immigrant history are among the more than 100 events planned for this year’s River to River Festival.

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s annual festival of dance, music, theater and visual art is to run June 14 through June 25 at locations in Lower Manhattan and on Governors Island.

“A Marvelous Order,” the opera about the Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs’s battle over the development of New York City (June 15-18), will be at Fulton Center, the transit and shopping hub. This work — by Joshua Frankel, Judd Greenstein, Will Rawls and Tracy K. Smith — will involve performances by singers and instrumentalists spread throughout the terminal against a backdrop of projected images by Mr. Frankel.

Kamau Ware’s “Black Gotham Experience,” a storytelling and visual art project that will be at multiple locations during the duration of the festival, will involve walking tours, graphic novels and more to celebrate the African diaspora in New York.

In the festival’s final days, June 22-25, En Garde Arts’s “Harbored” will be staged at the Winter Garden in Brookfield Place. The site-specific work, written and directed by Jimmy Maize, will incorporate more than 50 artists from the worlds of dance, theater and music for a performance collage about the history of immigration in the United States.
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Among the dance performances are works by Faye Driscoll (“Thank You for Coming: Play”), Beth Gill (“Catacomb”) and Jodi Melnick (“Works in Process/New Bodies”). Maria Hassabi, a cerebral choreographer whose dances verge on sculpture, will also return to River to River for the first time since 2014 with “Staged,” which had its premiere last year at the Kitchen.

This year’s festival is dedicated to the visionary choreographer Trisha Brown, who died in March at the age of 80, and the banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller, who also died in March, at age 101, and was a founder of the Lower